I'm ready for my tinfoil hat now

Let's go back in time to the year 2000. The country had just been through a highly divisive Presidential election that left us polarized. The majority of the people in this country voted to elect Vice President Al Gore to be our 43rd President yet because of the outdated electoral college system, some ballot shenanigans in Florida, and the US Supreme Court we ended up with Bush Jr as our President. The only people happy or satisfied with that outcome were the Republican party, every major multinational corporation, and Laura Bush, the rest of us were deeply unhappy about it and we were ready to revolt then and there, well some of us were.


It looked like it was going to be a contentious four years and due to the wafer thin margin of Bush's victory in Florida it also looked like Not Curious George was going to be a one term President just like his ineffectual father. But then something happened. Something bad. Something that would bring some people squarely in the camp of the President.
Two planes hit the Twin Towers in NYC, another slammed into the Pentagon, and another crashed in Pennsylvania countryside on 9/11/2001. I was still working for Myers Tire Supply back then and since it was a Tuesday I had just finished seeing some customers in Greeneville, TN and was on my way to Knoxville to do my usual Tuesday run and I was going to do our usual improv show later that night, stay with friends in Knoxville overnight, and do the far western portion of my territory the next day and be back home by Wed. evening. But when every radio station started doing stories about the planes in NYC and Washington DC then I knew what was going down was some bad shit.


What struck me then was how quick they started floating the name of Osama Bin Laden and his organization Al Qaeda. It seemed to me that as soon as the first tower fell they were pinning this on Osama and his boys with no evidence to back up their claims. It was like boom, plane hits so Bin Laden must be behind it. They did not bother to name anyone else which struck me as strange because it's not like Bin Laden was not the only terrorist who hated us then.


I finished my work day and rode over to my friend Todd's house. We watched, along with his wife, the coverage of the madness on TV. I called my gf many times that day as well to make sure she was seeing the madness too and to make sure she was doing okay. On TV they kept the Bin Laden/Al Qaeda/Muslim Terrorist drum beat going as they did non stop coverage of the tragic events.


As the days after 9/11 folded into months I began to question the official story that was coming out of the media and the White House. I began to wonder who benefited most from the attacks on our country and the people I kept coming back to were the people in the Bush junta. What better time, after all, to bring us all behind his lackluster leadership than when we were being attacked. The attacks gave him the reasons he needed to expand Presidential powers, pass the unpatriotic Patriot Act, bomb the regime he once supported in Afghanistan, and ultimately go to war with Iraq.


They used hoary evidence to connect Saddam Hussein to 9/11, in addition to their dubious claims about yellow cake uranium from Africa, and the WMDs that never turned up. In fact, you still here them say, "Well maybe we were wrong about the WMDs and Saddam but 9/11 changed everything. We had to go to war over there to keep another 9/11 from happening again."

My theory is then that 9/11 was an inside job. I think Bush and his Neo Con buddies knew something was going to go down, I refer you to the memo Condi dismissed that said Bin Laden was determined to attack us here in the USA, and they let it happen so they could push through their extremist policies, get people to support a highly unpopular President, and go to war in Iraq. The main target, the Twin Towers, were in a city that votes for Democrats and thus puts the whole state in the Democrat column on election day so why not sacrifice a few thousand people who are not going to vote for the Republicans anyway. By letting the other plane hit the Pentagon they could say, "Hey look, they tried to take us out too! It's not just the folks in NYC."


Maybe I'm being cynical but the government of this country has in the past bombed Cambodia "in secret" to try to win the Vietnam war, tried to overthrow Fidel Castro, backed the coup against Hugo Chavez, helped overthrow the legitimately elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile, backed Al Qaeda in their war against the USSR, conducted spying on it's own citizens, conducted horrific medical experiments on black soldiers, and much more that we may never know about. If we've got a government that will do all of those things then there is no reason to believe that they would not allow the attacks of 9/11 to proceed knowing that they could accomplish their goals soon afterward.


After McVeigh and his militia buddies blew up that federal building in Oklahoma City I used to laugh at people who said, "I love my country but I fear my government." After 9/11 and it's aftermath I'm not so sure they're so wrong anymore. I don't believe in every crackpot conspiracy theory, but I do realize that some of them have grains of truth behind them. If you believe the official version of the 9/11 events then that's fine by me but I'm going to continue to be skeptical of whatever Bush and the corporate media tells me, because they all benefit from what happened on 9/11 and they continue to benefit from the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan.

So there's my 9/11 anniversary piece and now you know how I feel about it. So, the only thing left for me now is to choose which tinfoil hat I'm going to wear. Should I go for the tinfoil sombrero?

Or for this more sporty yet vaguely Teutonic tinfoil chapeau?

I'm in no hurry since after all there's not going to be another terrorist attack since we're killing all those terrorists in Iraq now.